Up and down the valley, Jimmie took other work, and word reached Brentwood that he was making sums of money. Lazy members of his totem would associate any task like fencing with sums of money. To Jackie Smolders, for example, it occurred that he should cross the Divide and ask for his part – a maternal uncle’s part, supreme in Mungindi lore – of Jimmie’s pay.
But Jackie mistrusted the mountains. There were fables about their formation that alarmed him.
There was one fortnight when Jimmie seemed taken over by a bad spirit, lassitude and submission he could not account for. Obsessed, he spent the time at Verona, frightened by the obsession. And Verona frightened him too. It seemed that an eye – God’s eye – had ceased to see Verona squarely. The image ran like an ulcer at the edges.
At night the candle-light was fragmented, and shattered the silhouettes of boys from town and lubras dancing out their death.
One evening a hut lit up and began to burn with a festive intensity. It belonged to a fat lady whose friends held her back from entering this purest thing in Verona, this diverse squalor refined to the clean unity of a tongue of fire.
“All me things!” she kept screaming. “All me things! All me keepsakes!”
For a second Jimmie Blacksmith would willingly have burned Verona off the map.
Sometimes too he would ask a girl, “Wot’s yer animal-spirit, eh, yer black bitch? I bin killin’ a lot of animals lately. What animal’s got yer soul, eh?”
They didn’t like that sort of chat. But he was the one in genuine alarm.
One evening he was woken. It was a Saturday and he had drunk a lot of bad sherry early in the afternoon.
“Get up, Jimmie,” one of the anonymous people of Verona asked him. “Harry Edwards gone and stuck ’im a whitey wiv a knife.”
“The whitey much hurt?”
“Hurt? ’Im fuckin’ dead, Jimmie. Git up. Yer got t’help bury ’im.”
“Yer kin bury ’im yerselves.”
The Mungindi were able to handle their aitches, the natives of Verona only some, but a rough sort of politeness made Jimmie copy them.
“We let yer have our woman. Yer help us bury this bloody whitey.”
It was a bitter night. To step from the animal-warm hut into the midnight was like walking on to a knife.
There were a dozen men in Harry Edwards’s hut, all wide-eyed at the lovely dead white boy with his well-sewn hare-lip. Blood was still surging out of his upper belly as from something living. Jimmie had seen the face somewhere, in one of the towns.
The wound bled so plentifully onto the earth floor that Sally, wife to Harry, began to pack her chairs onto the stinking bed in the corner.
Someone said that the boy could be best carried a distance in a blanket, by the four corners. Sally replied that she didn’t want to have a good blanket ruined beyond repair.
“’E was orright,” Harry explained. “’E go and lie down with Sally.”
“Don’t do much, ’e don’t,” Sally said.
“’E wake up and don’t know where ’e is. He says we tricked ’im ’ere to sleep with filthy gin, I ask ’im for a little cash. ’E go bloody mad. Yellin’. ’E start breakin’ ’em Sally things. I got to stop ’im. I git meat knife.”
“Jesus, yer made a big hole in ’im, Harry.”
“He with mates?” Jimmie Blacksmith asked. Because if the boy had come with friends, they might begin to search Verona for him.
“They hang Harry certain as all shit,” Harry said. “But I didn’t see no friends.”
They took one of the blankets from Sally’s bed to wrap the boy in. Then another just for carrying, so that Sally lost two. An old man went ahead with a storm lantern, then the eight or nine carriers and a boy dragging a eucalyptus bough. The earth was uneven but the corpse light. They could carry him one-handed, sometimes bringing their other hand to bear when the balance shifted.
“What animal’s got yer soul, eh?” Jimmie had asked black girls.
When the corpse jolted it was with a slick wet sound and everyone averted his eyes and mind from the bad omen of blood too copious for the blanket to take in.
“Here,” someone said. Dubious authority: for this place was close to the camp. Someone would have to move it on the first quiet night. Places were infected by the bad portent of blood. Even places where the New South Wales Commissioner for Aboriginal Affairs said, “Here shall be a camp”; naming it Verona in whimsical hope of justice as fine as Shakespeare’s. Even such places as that were infected. Those in the know would tend, while sleeping, to suffer from the gory omens of the dead boy.
“Here,” the voice said, anxious to be safe quickly, as all of them were.
Between them they managed to dig a hole two feet deep. In the dark they confused each other with meaningless advice.
The boy they wrapped up with all the evil auguries of his blood neat in Sally’s blanket.
“What animal’s got yer soul, eh?”
Not only did Jimmie feel that Verona, its chaos of black-white meanness, was off God’s globe, if God had a globe. But worse, that they had hurriedly buried the animal of their true totem without propitiatory rites and out of a necessity that should not have arisen.
He had no family there and no woman he loved; and so, except for one other visit a year later, that was the last time he went to Verona.
For he was a hybrid. If he had been tribal man, love would have been written into the order of his day. All his acts would have been acts of solemn and ritual preference. Love would have been in their fibre.
But having chosen to grub and build as whites do, he knew that love was a special fire that came down from God. A mere visitor. After a brief hectic season, it extended itself more soberly to your children and the boundaries of your land.
Suspended between the loving tribal life and the European rapture from on high called falling in love (at which even Mr Neville had hinted), Jimmie Blacksmith held himself firm and soundly despised as many people as he could.
But there is little enough interest in a man who loves nobody. In fact, Jimmie was surprised to find that he loved his half-brother Morton, who was innocent and loyal, who came to see Jimmie because he hated the thought of kinsmen lost amidst strangers.
In the time between Verona and Morton’s arrival, Jimmie Blacksmith had worked for a number of farmers, who had cautioned and paid him in the Healy style.
Now he had taken a contract with an old Scot called Claude Lewis.
Lewis mistrusted Morton, who had Dulcie’s flippancy. As old Lewis stumped about with a yard-stick, breathing sinusitically through a soiled moustache, Mort would double with laughter, would sit down on a tree-stump and quiver at some quaintness in the man.
“What’s worryin’ blackie, o’er thire?”
“Nothin’, Mr Lewis. He’s jist a boy.”
“Yer nae gunner turn me property into a blacks’ camp, are ye?”
“No, boss. No blacks’ camp.”
How these farmers feared the tribal intentions of the black man.
“Cut it out, Mort,” Jimmie would scream. “Give it a rest.”
Lewis would snort into his greyed slack moustache that had once been ginger and buoyant.
“Still canna see what he’s laughin’ at.”
When Lewis was gone, Jimmie would reproach Morton; but sometimes he too would be infected by laughter.
“The whitey he made me,” he said once, “he must have been solemn bastard. Or somethink.”
Morton had found him early on in the Lewis contract. It had been a hot day in December 1898, and Jimmie had felt unease the moment he saw a black stick wading in the ghost-vapours where the road took a crest at least a mile away.
He sensed the stick was kin of his. It proved to be thin kin, with big child-like teeth, chanting wild affection in Mungindi plainsong:
Breed of Emu-Wren, see your breed coming
Shouting the day’s joy as you
Shout the day’s welcome.
I sing my welcomes to you too
As I take you by the shoulders
And my hands clap,
Recognizing eyes, and beards
Jutted with smiling.
Though he could not stop himself smiling, Jimmie Blacksmith was wary of the song and Morton’s love. Therefore he made it clear to Mort that he allowed him to stay for reasons of commerce rather than of tribal section.
“If yer couldn’ work like yer do, I’d boot yer black arse out of here.”
It was, in fact, all nervousness with Mort, and a desire to give a kind of welcome.
Such welcomes Lewis wouldn’t accept. The Scot found fault all the time, fictional faults with his yardstick – cannier, he implied, than Jimmie’s tape. There were threats that Jimmie’s poor wages would be cut to a point at which he would not be able to buy food for Mort and himself.
Jimmie, once more, did not know Scottish history, or reasons why people called Lewis should relish so their ferocious bookkeeping.
One morning Jimmie and Mort Blacksmith simply walked away from Lewis’s.
Over the hills, in Scone, they got casual work from a squatter. Mort got a reputation as a horse-breaker. His talent arose from his ignorance and lack of fear of wild horses and his willingness to believe the best of animals. His big toes hooked into the horse’s belly, his thin boy’s body jolted madly up and down the spine. Of course, he giggled without ceasing. In the end even the horse would be bemused by that.
The once or twice he was thrown he would lie belly-first in the dirt and then roll on his back, one leg crooked like a tickled dog, hooting and whooping glee.
“All the bloody time laugh, Mort, it’s no good.”
“Why?”
“Yard boss say bloody stupid boong … Next thing yer know about yer git yer marchin’ orders.”
But the laughter persisted, and had a hint about it that Mort’s joke was very private and cherished for its secrecy. Whites resented such hints.
One night Jimmie had another strange experience of this endless chortling. At the blacks’ camp outside Scone, he slept with a full-blood in the same room where Mort had her half-breed sister. The symmetry of the situation was not planned, yet might have accounted why, half-way through his penetration of the girl, Mort could be heard chuckling. And the girl too, as if he had passed the contagion of his joke to her with his seed.
The truth was that Mort was only seventeen, and awkward.
In the late autumn of 1899, the two brothers went home to Brentwood. In the mission station the legend was rife of the Blacksmith brothers’ success in the large world.
A child who saw them called out, “Here come the rich fellers.”
Tabidgi Jackie Smolders waited at Dulcie’s place to receive the maternal uncle’s share of their goods and money. Forty-two years, but an ancient man. His status had not stopped him from drinking sherry-and-varnish. As a result his beard had fallen out in tufts.
“Yer don’t want t’ think us Blacksmiths rich boys,” Mort told him. “I got fifteen bob and some beef and flour.”
Tabidgi was visibly disappointed at Morton’s pathetic inventory. Nonetheless he took what Mort had and distributed it amongst Emu-Wren, as much as distribution was feasible.
The ambitions of Emu-Wren being blatantly alcoholic this chilly day, Jimmie Blacksmith made a sour face at the tribal system itself. Mort, less complex, less undermined, could not be dissuaded from simple, giggling joy at being home.
“How yer off, Jimmie?”
There was a crowd to see Jimmie Blacksmith give up his fortune to his kin. To them one was identified, endowed, augmented, in the giving.
“How’m I off?”
“Yer got much, Jimmie?”
“Much what?”
Everyone was frowning.
“Christ!” Jimmie screamed and took notes and silver from his pocket and pelted them at the dust.
It was a great loss to him. It was the measure of his experience of the world, his £2 15s. It should not have come from him so easily. Now he had only the things that swagmen have, flour, beef, tobacco.
In the shock of having done what he had done he went indoors in Dulcie’s hut and lay on a mattress with his face to the wall. Where bark had shorn off, a piece of tin was hammered to an upright, but free at one end. It trembled delicately with the wind – Dulcie would have to see to something more adequate than that. Nammonia – to use Dulcie’s word – got in at places like that. Nammonia had killed Wilf.
Dulcie followed him inside.
“Tired?”
“Yair. We have a gab a little later, eh, Dulcie?”
“Orright.”
She pottered about, crooning.
Child of mine, spill what tears you have
As you grow to be a man
Your tears will grow to be
Rivers in high flood.
“Tabidgi made Wilf nice cross,” she called. “The parson say his prayers real nice for poor bloody old Wilf. He was awful sick. He was always talkin’ about findin’ you, about goin’ off. He use t’ call yer name out when he had his fits.”
For the rest of his home-coming day, Jimmie Blacksmith slept off his confusion. As he slept, Tabidgi selected men to sneak into town for booze.
He stayed two days only at Brentwood, sleeping a great deal and in a kind of languor. Sometimes he was awoken by lurching songs – all his money going up in bad music.
He found out too that Dulcie had remarried: that was a detail Dulcie had not mentioned. The groom was a half-breed half-wit who chuckled like Mort, yet far more vacantly, far more quietly. He sat in corners studiously spitting bloody phlegm into a peach tin. You could have fitted a cricket ball between the sagging ganglions at the base of his throat.
Of course, Jimmie vacated the marriage mattress and slept wrapped in a blanket, slept strenuously, sapped and in shock. Perhaps in what anthropologists would call cultural shock later on, too late to help Emu-Wren.
Now Dulcie was old and slept with dying men. The maternal uncle was a moulting drunkard. Dottie had consumption and a husband who beat her. Emu-Wren was hawking up its living tissue.
He should have been glad but was unconsolable. When Dulcie brought him food he turned his head into a corner.
“You paley bastard make me sad,” she said. But she was not desolate. Her brain sat warmly behind its tribal vapours. And booze too. One night she would fall down drunk and frost would grow over her. A swift nammonia would see her safe into Brentwood cemetery.